Window Washers Bring Superhero Surprise to Child Patients

"The kids always come up to the window and ask us, 'Are you Spiderman?'" Steve Oszaniec, a 23-year employee of the Chicago-based American National Skyline window cleaning company, told ABCNews.com today. "So I came up with the idea of, 'Why don't we just show up as Spiderman?'"

With the plan hatched, Oszaniec, son Danny Oszaniec and their colleague, Jordan Emerson, pitched the idea to their boss, Sean Conley, in the company's Memphis office and to hospital administrators, who all quickly said yes.

The trio then purchased their costumes – two Spiderman suits and one Captain America – and Oct. 17 turned the hospital into a scene straight out of a comic book.

"We just went there, put them on and went up," Oszaniec said. "They [hospital staff] brought a lot of the kids to the little family room there so they could see us. It was unbelievable. They just totally forgot they were sick for a minute. They were just ecstatic about it."

Oszaniec, who describes himself in real-life as "more Captain Old Country than Captain America," says the dressed-up superheroes also shot silly string as they repelled up and down the 12-story hospital building for four hours to make their Spiderman takeover even more life-like.

Hospital administrators say what Oszaniec and his colleagues did was, all jokes aside, truly heroic.

"It's a real thing," hospital spokeswoman Sara Burnett said of the use of out-of-the-box therapies like this one to help kids heal. "When a child's mind gets off their pain and their sickness, it makes them heal, it makes them relax and it helps them recover and get better quicker."